Unoriginality 4: The Little Thinks
by Farla
Summary: Because sometimes those little details can actually be kind of annoying if you get them wrong. Ch1: A conflagration of Flames and Embers, Goldeenson, and the opening to the epic of Pinky.


One of the positives about reviewing a lot is it does give a lot more material for these sort of things.

Incidentally, there are few things more hilarious than the average animal on their first exposure to hardwood floors.

* * *

The annual meeting of ponyta proceeded in its usual fashion, which is to say it rapidly degenerated to a confused shouting match.

During the opening discussion, one ponyta in the crowd kicked at the dirt midway through.

"Stop disrupting things, Ember!" snapped the speaker.

A fifth of the group began to bicker about who had been meant. "It doesn't even matter," one shouted. "It's really all Flame's fault for being such a boring speaker!"

A half dozen of the opening speakers all shouted in outrage, then turned on each other to determine who was actually being referred to.

A few more comments about Cinder and Blaze and the whole place was first the latter and then the former.

From the ashes, one ponyta spoke. "I'd like to propose that we consider a wider variety of names or possibly some sort of numbering system..."

(*)

"What I'm saying," shouted the goldeen, "is that, from my perspective as an actual goldeen, it just seems ridiculous that someone like you would be called Goldeenson."

"I'm named that because I get close to water," the charmander shouted back. "You don't see the rest of the tribe around, do you?"

"I can barely see you!"

"Well, you can't expect me to walk right up. I mean, it's all...splashy. And wet."

(*)

_He was getting squished and bumped around. He wriggled unhappily. Something was being tugged off him. Now he was cold, and his eyes opened to see a bunch of strange people standing around where he was on the cut tree floor. He stood up, but his feet slipped on the smooth ground. One had black hair on the top of its head and some of its face, and one had brown hair just on the top that was long, and a third smaller one had short black and brown hair on the top._

_"Look!" the brown-haired one said. "He's already opened his eyes!" She used her human arms to lift the spawn by his legs. "Our son looks very healthy, Hair On Top Of Head."_

_"Is that my brother?" asked the brown-and-black hair one. "Can I name him?"_

_"Of course, Many Sounds," said Hair On Top Of Head. "Your mother Hairless Skin and I think that's a great idea."_

_Many Sounds thought for a moment. "I will name him Pinky, because he is pink."_

_"What a good name," said Hairless Skin. "Let us leave this closet and go contact the others living inside this house." She stood on her two legs, able to easily balance on the slippery floor due to being older and experienced at standing. "I will inform Tan and Brown-eyes. They and the other humans will be glad to hear of our new spawn Pinky, who is_

"What're you doing?" a growlithe asked.

"I'm writing a story about a human," the other one explained. "His pack will be killed by other evil humans but he will not be there because he went out climbing a sheer cliff that day with his hands and he sees the whole thing even though he's really high up because humans have great eyes, then he will meet up with growlithe who will take him in, and climb trees and swim in water, and then there will be another human pack that arrives and-"

"Are you sure the newborn are called spawn?" the first growlithe asked dubiously.

"Don't be stupid. They're not like growlithe pups, everybody knows they're called spawn."

"And aren't they all pinkish?"

"So?"

"And can't all of them make lots of sounds?"

"Yeah, that's why they're so cool!"

"But it's not like your parents named you Ember or something, Faith."

"Because that'd be dumb. Everybody can use ember. It's not like being pink. That's a big deal! Have you ever met a growlithe that was pink?"

* * *

In sum, don't be a stupid growlithe and write about pokemon living in packs or herds yet living in nuclear families in their own separate dwelling, behaving similarly to you, interacting with the environment around them like you, having the babies be instantly capable, and naming them all based on stuff you find odd about them. Pokemon shouldn't be written like you're writing about humans who you occasionally remember don't have hands and are different in a couple convenient ways that let you skip over sections you don't care about. Just look at how ridiculous it gets writing about people through a growlithe filter.

Definitely don't pick a tiny handful of really obvious names, as it begs the question of how they're being kept straight. People in the past were not named Humanguy. They were named based on _other_ animals, because when you're all humans, being human is not a big deal, while being like various other things is. If you're a big guy, you're kinda like a bear compared to other people, even if you're still a puny human compared to an actual one. If you swim really well, you're kinda like a fish, even though you're still spending most of your time on land.

If pokemon are using similar naming patterns, they should be naming based on what's an extreme for their culture - a charmander that gets close to water gets a name indicating they're "that charmander that loves water" even if the non-fire types think this is stupid because by "loves" they mean "did not run screaming from like the rest of the tribe". And of course they'll send that charmander out as ambassador to the water types. Hilarity! Really, for those of you doing pokemon as monospecies tribes, this is a sadly overlooked way of making for some really interesting interactions, and also helps with the bad habit of making everyone in a group identical. The goldeen that charmander meets is probably the goldeen who, in the rest of the school's opinion, is entirely too interested in the land, why, they even enter the shallow water on occasion!

If your pokemon have mixed societies, of course, this wouldn't hold. In those cases you're better off naming based on more general concepts or just jumping straight to names without obvious meaning like most modern ones.


End file.
